6 ms·

Google's Project Nimbus is the future of evil

93 points by danboarder 4y ago

jqpabc123 4y ago
But you should also be well-informed when a company who was founded on a principle of "Don't Be Evil" turns full circle and becomes the evil it warned us about. LOL! About that "Don't Be Evil" thing --- that was the warning. It was a marketing pitch to distract from the fact that evil was what they had in mind all along.
- o0-0o 4y ago
  - cutierust 4y ago
- didericis 4y ago
  > evil was what they had in mind all along I don’t think this level of cynicism is helpful or particularly true. Knowing that power corrupts and actually preventing yourself from being corrupted by power are two totally different things. If you really, really want to solve a problem effectively, and know you’ll accumulate a ton of power if you succeed, its extremely easy to overestimate your ability to get the genie to do good once it’s out of the bottle. Having to deal with the entire world pressuring you and trying to claw into your organization and inject their own interests is extremely difficult, and it changes people.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    Not true? Google grew out of Brin and Page's graduate research project at Columbia University funded by the NSA and CIA through the National Science Foundation and aimed at mass surveillance. And their association with these organizations has continued to the present. The "Don't be Evil" motto suggests to me that they were fully cognizant right from the start of what they had embraced and wanted to mute any public perception of that. And your apologetic response shows how much they succeeded. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engine-google-ranks-cia-agents/281490/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...
    - didericis 4y ago
      The fact that any association with the NSA and CIA is considered evil shows how much of the terror of the cold war and nuclear annihilation we’ve forgotten. I’m highly skeptical of US intelligence agencies and think they are and have been corrupt, but I also understand the realities involved in maintaining a relatively peaceful global trade network in a world with billions of people, a collapsed soviet empire, and nuclear weapons. I also think it’s worth remembering what the KGB and soviet intelligence and surveillance state was like. Maybe Brin and Page were secretly evil lizard people that wanted to turn the globe into North Korea, but I think the more likely explanation was that they were like most high level academic researchers: obsessively interested in seeing how far they could take their ideas, and overly optimistic about their positive impact and view of the military/intelligence as the good guys. Another fantastic example of that starry eyed optimism paired with dangerous government involvement was Project Orion. What was originally envisioned by its creators as a nuclear propelled rocket to propel humanity to the stars was corrupted by the cold war push for military dominance that funded it. In that case the potential for misuse was so great (one potential design was a battleship that was basically like a real life death star) that they scrapped it, but the scientists involved weren’t interested in building a death star. They were interested in building a nuclear space ship more powerful and with a greater launch capacity than anything we’ve ever designed before or since, and getting funding for it. I personally believe everything possible should be done to make centralized surveillance impossible, because we’d need to repeal the fourth amendment to allow it if we’re serious about true and not “approximate” rule of law, and the dangers are too great, but I recognize that there was an argument to be made to justify involvement with intelligence agencies, and that a researcher salivating for funding and propelling their idea into the positive future the envision would think it’d be controllable and worth the risk.
10g1k 4y ago
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Just use your browser's reader mode instead of trying to push your agenda on censorship, or don't click it. People should be free to make their own decisions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10g1k 4y ago
    Most users don't know anything about different browser modes, and popups take away their choice.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Can anyone provide information on accuracy, lack thereof, or false positives?
llui85 4y ago
The Intercept seems to have a few more details: https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial-intelligence-project-nimbus/ https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial...
deltree7 4y ago
National Security is an incredibly complex, nuanced debate. You should always take articles written by "an amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic. There's nothing he can't take apart, but many things he can't reassemble". If Russia attacks your country or a terrorist blows a building, no one and no one blames "amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic" about intelligence failures. But, we find this increasingly acceptable to push articles written by people who have absolutely no clue about anything (technology, security, geopolitics, threats, intelligence), just because the headline "hurr durr, Google/Amazon/Uber/Meta/...is evil"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jjulius 4y ago
  Do you have any comment about the content of the piece itself?
  - deltree7 4y ago
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      The author's credentials are not important. Any bad logic or assumptions that seem incredulous are. Can you elaborate on those parts?
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Can I ask what your credentials are? And could you write a post addressing their points? Edit: that sounds hostile, it isn't meant to, just curious.
      - anon9384929 4y ago
        Stop defaulting to asking for sources or credentials and make your own case for why we should listen to the authors points
aaron695 4y ago
g42gregory 4y ago
Ok, advertising companies are targeting everyone in sight, including little kids, making Internet as addictive as crack so that people would waste their time and life just so that they could make more money. Then they are selling all the behavioral data to everyone who will pay. And this Nimbus project is the "future of evil"? Not even close, as far I am concerned.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Selling technology that pretends to know when you're lying to a state/army that engages in apartheid and regularly shoots, maims and tortures palestinians rates pretty fucking high on the evil scale.
- NackerHughes 4y ago
  Yes it is. The advertising companies you describe are the present of evil.
0xedd 4y ago
alok-g 4y ago
Given the amount of corruption, deciet, lies I have seen, I would love to see this direction proliferate. Of course, there are chances of the tech itself being gamed, however, it would be great to see action against corrupt people, most of which are able to get by as pursuing in the courts is non-scalable and there's rarely a way to prove. The systems would need to keep improving step by step. The bad people will keep finding workarounds. It will be a cat and mouse game surely. May everything be recorded; may everything be automatically analysed; may the culprits be punished on the spot.
- 0x_rs 4y ago
  Ours may be recorded and we may be declared guilty until proven innocent, but never those whose decisions matter. https://euobserver.com/eu-political/155377 https://euobserver.com/eu-political/155377
- nmeagent 4y ago
  I don't want to live in your monstrous notion of a surveillance utopia.
  - alok-g 4y ago
    You are perhaps lucky enough to be not living in a society with excessive corruption. :-)
    - nmeagent 4y ago
      Perhaps, but I believe you would trade excessive corruption for an absolute nightmare. There would be cat and mouse games, sure, but you and everybody you care about would be the mice. Your life would be subject to perpetual inspection. If you were to say or do anything that the current regime or any future regime deemed unacceptable, you would be dealt with swiftly. Why on Earth would you want to live like that?
      - alok-g 4y ago
        Yeah. I want the 'surveillance utopia' along with a good leadership. The latter is a must for it to be useful, else more bads will happen than good.
cryptos 4y ago
At least Google was so honest to remove "Don't be evil." from its code of conduct.
cerol 4y ago
> Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models. > Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,” The "training documents" he mentions are basically a GCP manual. [0] "facial recognition, landmarks, emotions, ..." These are ML 101. Does my face have a second degree equation pointing up? Happy. Is it pointing down? Sad. It's like the car dealer rambling about the leather seat that reclines, when you're only interested in the horsepower. It's a sales pitch. This reminds when the Intercept made a whole piece about the brazilian DMV's "dystopian system" that could "integrate multiple data sources" just to say it was a SQL join. [0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-nimbus-webinar https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-...
- lovelearning 4y ago
  The simplicity or complexity of the technical implementation doesn't change the intention in any way.
potamic 4y ago
While I'm convinced Google and Amazon are doing plenty evil, this article is just a fear mongering piece. There is nothing alarming about a cloud migration project. Just like every other agency in the world, the Israeli government has decided it's time to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud. Google and Amazon just happened to have won the contract (huh, what a surprise). When you pick GCP or AWS, of course it will come with all the managed services they have to offer. Any individual in the world who signs up for GCP or AWS will have access to all these services including the vision API, AI and ML tools. Google does not vet whether an individual should be using these services, why should the government be treated differently? The article is doing the age old folly of blaming the tools instead of the actor. If Google does not provide technology to the government, somebody else will. Heck, the government can even build those capabilities in house, the research is largely in the public domain. The real problem is holding your government accountable and having policies in place which prevent authorities from violating human rights. It's a political problem that needs a political solution. Blaming everyone else is not going to solve the problem by any means. So make sure you elect the right government.

93 points by danboarder 4y ago

But you should also be well-informed when a company who was founded on a principle of "Don't Be Evil" turns full circle and becomes the evil it warned us about. LOL! About that "Don't Be Evil" thing --- that was the warning. It was a marketing pitch to distract from the fact that evil was what they had in mind all along.

o0-0o 4y ago
- cutierust 4y ago
didericis 4y ago
> evil was what they had in mind all along I don’t think this level of cynicism is helpful or particularly true. Knowing that power corrupts and actually preventing yourself from being corrupted by power are two totally different things. If you really, really want to solve a problem effectively, and know you’ll accumulate a ton of power if you succeed, its extremely easy to overestimate your ability to get the genie to do good once it’s out of the bottle. Having to deal with the entire world pressuring you and trying to claw into your organization and inject their own interests is extremely difficult, and it changes people.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  Not true? Google grew out of Brin and Page's graduate research project at Columbia University funded by the NSA and CIA through the National Science Foundation and aimed at mass surveillance. And their association with these organizations has continued to the present. The "Don't be Evil" motto suggests to me that they were fully cognizant right from the start of what they had embraced and wanted to mute any public perception of that. And your apologetic response shows how much they succeeded. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engine-google-ranks-cia-agents/281490/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...
  - didericis 4y ago
    The fact that any association with the NSA and CIA is considered evil shows how much of the terror of the cold war and nuclear annihilation we’ve forgotten. I’m highly skeptical of US intelligence agencies and think they are and have been corrupt, but I also understand the realities involved in maintaining a relatively peaceful global trade network in a world with billions of people, a collapsed soviet empire, and nuclear weapons. I also think it’s worth remembering what the KGB and soviet intelligence and surveillance state was like. Maybe Brin and Page were secretly evil lizard people that wanted to turn the globe into North Korea, but I think the more likely explanation was that they were like most high level academic researchers: obsessively interested in seeing how far they could take their ideas, and overly optimistic about their positive impact and view of the military/intelligence as the good guys. Another fantastic example of that starry eyed optimism paired with dangerous government involvement was Project Orion. What was originally envisioned by its creators as a nuclear propelled rocket to propel humanity to the stars was corrupted by the cold war push for military dominance that funded it. In that case the potential for misuse was so great (one potential design was a battleship that was basically like a real life death star) that they scrapped it, but the scientists involved weren’t interested in building a death star. They were interested in building a nuclear space ship more powerful and with a greater launch capacity than anything we’ve ever designed before or since, and getting funding for it. I personally believe everything possible should be done to make centralized surveillance impossible, because we’d need to repeal the fourth amendment to allow it if we’re serious about true and not “approximate” rule of law, and the dangers are too great, but I recognize that there was an argument to be made to justify involvement with intelligence agencies, and that a researcher salivating for funding and propelling their idea into the positive future the envision would think it’d be controllable and worth the risk.

10g1k 4y ago

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Just use your browser's reader mode instead of trying to push your agenda on censorship, or don't click it. People should be free to make their own decisions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 10g1k 4y ago
  Most users don't know anything about different browser modes, and popups take away their choice.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Can anyone provide information on accuracy, lack thereof, or false positives?

llui85 4y ago

The Intercept seems to have a few more details: https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial-intelligence-project-nimbus/ https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial...

deltree7 4y ago

National Security is an incredibly complex, nuanced debate. You should always take articles written by "an amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic. There's nothing he can't take apart, but many things he can't reassemble". If Russia attacks your country or a terrorist blows a building, no one and no one blames "amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic" about intelligence failures. But, we find this increasingly acceptable to push articles written by people who have absolutely no clue about anything (technology, security, geopolitics, threats, intelligence), just because the headline "hurr durr, Google/Amazon/Uber/Meta/...is evil"

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jjulius 4y ago
Do you have any comment about the content of the piece itself?
- deltree7 4y ago
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    The author's credentials are not important. Any bad logic or assumptions that seem incredulous are. Can you elaborate on those parts?
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Can I ask what your credentials are? And could you write a post addressing their points? Edit: that sounds hostile, it isn't meant to, just curious.
    - anon9384929 4y ago
      Stop defaulting to asking for sources or credentials and make your own case for why we should listen to the authors points

aaron695 4y ago

g42gregory 4y ago

Ok, advertising companies are targeting everyone in sight, including little kids, making Internet as addictive as crack so that people would waste their time and life just so that they could make more money. Then they are selling all the behavioral data to everyone who will pay. And this Nimbus project is the "future of evil"? Not even close, as far I am concerned.

ohgodplsno 4y ago
Selling technology that pretends to know when you're lying to a state/army that engages in apartheid and regularly shoots, maims and tortures palestinians rates pretty fucking high on the evil scale.
NackerHughes 4y ago
Yes it is. The advertising companies you describe are the present of evil.

0xedd 4y ago

alok-g 4y ago

Given the amount of corruption, deciet, lies I have seen, I would love to see this direction proliferate. Of course, there are chances of the tech itself being gamed, however, it would be great to see action against corrupt people, most of which are able to get by as pursuing in the courts is non-scalable and there's rarely a way to prove. The systems would need to keep improving step by step. The bad people will keep finding workarounds. It will be a cat and mouse game surely. May everything be recorded; may everything be automatically analysed; may the culprits be punished on the spot.

0x_rs 4y ago
Ours may be recorded and we may be declared guilty until proven innocent, but never those whose decisions matter. https://euobserver.com/eu-political/155377 https://euobserver.com/eu-political/155377
nmeagent 4y ago
I don't want to live in your monstrous notion of a surveillance utopia.
- alok-g 4y ago
  You are perhaps lucky enough to be not living in a society with excessive corruption. :-)
  - nmeagent 4y ago
    Perhaps, but I believe you would trade excessive corruption for an absolute nightmare. There would be cat and mouse games, sure, but you and everybody you care about would be the mice. Your life would be subject to perpetual inspection. If you were to say or do anything that the current regime or any future regime deemed unacceptable, you would be dealt with swiftly. Why on Earth would you want to live like that?
    - alok-g 4y ago
      Yeah. I want the 'surveillance utopia' along with a good leadership. The latter is a must for it to be useful, else more bads will happen than good.

cryptos 4y ago

At least Google was so honest to remove "Don't be evil." from its code of conduct.

cerol 4y ago

> Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models. > Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,” The "training documents" he mentions are basically a GCP manual. [0] "facial recognition, landmarks, emotions, ..." These are ML 101. Does my face have a second degree equation pointing up? Happy. Is it pointing down? Sad. It's like the car dealer rambling about the leather seat that reclines, when you're only interested in the horsepower. It's a sales pitch. This reminds when the Intercept made a whole piece about the brazilian DMV's "dystopian system" that could "integrate multiple data sources" just to say it was a SQL join. [0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-nimbus-webinar https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-...

lovelearning 4y ago
The simplicity or complexity of the technical implementation doesn't change the intention in any way.

potamic 4y ago

While I'm convinced Google and Amazon are doing plenty evil, this article is just a fear mongering piece. There is nothing alarming about a cloud migration project. Just like every other agency in the world, the Israeli government has decided it's time to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud. Google and Amazon just happened to have won the contract (huh, what a surprise). When you pick GCP or AWS, of course it will come with all the managed services they have to offer. Any individual in the world who signs up for GCP or AWS will have access to all these services including the vision API, AI and ML tools. Google does not vet whether an individual should be using these services, why should the government be treated differently? The article is doing the age old folly of blaming the tools instead of the actor. If Google does not provide technology to the government, somebody else will. Heck, the government can even build those capabilities in house, the research is largely in the public domain. The real problem is holding your government accountable and having policies in place which prevent authorities from violating human rights. It's a political problem that needs a political solution. Blaming everyone else is not going to solve the problem by any means. So make sure you elect the right government.